News Items

Because it is still relevant, I have put a link at the end of this post to my original "Welcome to AIDS Origins" message from 2006, written a couple of years after the site first went live.

First of all, let me sincerely thank the Webmaster for reorganising this site. This has taken a lot of work, all of which has been done in his own time, and without any financial recompense. The reorganisation has necessitated the site being down for a short time, and we apologise to those readers who may have been inconvenienced.

The benefits of the new system include a new design, a simplified and far more accessible layout of articles, a better search mechanism within the site, and (for the first time) a direct link to the full-length (91 minute) YouTube version of the documentary film "The Origins of AIDS", which was originally released in 2003.

Free subscription to mailings from the site continues, just by signing up with your name and email address. If you like what you find here, please pass it on and tell your friends.

So, seven further years have passed, and with the advent of this new site I think it is time for me to add a few words about my own position, in response to questions that I have been asked hundreds of times by readers of this site. At the same time certain details need to remain confidential for now, meaning that I shall not be giving too much away about future plans, for instance.

A man recently wrote in to this web-site to ask me an interesting question: why was it that I was still writing about the origins of AIDS? He reasoned that for most people (at least in the West) AIDS is now a treatable disease; most of the people who were involved with the CHAT oral polio vaccine in the 1950s are now dead, and in any case it is unlikely that my theory of origin will ever be definitively proved as true. Under these circumstances, why keep going? Was it just in order to apportion blame?

It is with great regret that I have learnt through one of the subscribers to this site of the death of the American journalist Tom Curtis on January 22nd, 2017. Below is the notice that appeared on his Facebook page.

"To all friends of Tom Curtis.

Tom passed away peacefully at noon today after a many-years-long struggle with Parkinson's disease. He will be sorely missed by the many who knew him and worked with him over the past 70+ years. There will be a gathering at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 502 Church Rear Street, Galveston, TX on January 29 at 10:30 a.m. According to my sources, everyone who knew or admired Tom would be welcome to attend."

A new paper from the team of the University of Arizona molecular biologist, Michael Worobey, has just been published in Nature, to the usual fanfare of publicity. It seeks to demonstrate that the Canadian air steward, Gaetan Dugas, was not responsible for seeding the AIDS epidemic in the United States.

Some weeks ago I heard disturbing rumours of new activity on Wikipedia regarding my work and that of Brian Martin. I asked Robert Dildine, who has previously done excellent work in this and similar areas, to investigate, and he has produced the following piece, which I commend to our readership.

Many thanks to all those who continue to write in to this web-site with their support and encouragement, and sometimes with fresh information as well. All such messages are greatly appreciated. It's immensely reassuring that I can only recall one or two unsympathetic messages among the thousands received since we started this site 11 years ago.

A paper entitled "A Strange Case of Certainty", written by Robert Dildine, an American analyst with a background in economics and law, has recently been posted on Brian Martin's excellent Suppression of Dissent website. The paper analyses ways in which, even in a democratic society, institutional interests (both governmental and corporate) can influence or subtly control the thinking and opinions of individuals, especially in instances where popular opinion may have important political or economic implications.

[A recent communication from one of the co-authors of the Faria paper has provided new information, which requires an updated response from myself. Surprisingly, this information reveals even more evidence in favour of the OPV theory. Ed Hooper, November 11th, 2014.]

Several people have recently asked (either via the AIDSorigins site or via on-line message boards) for my opinions on the latest article about dating the beginning of the AIDS epidemic to Leopoldville/KInshasa in 1920.

Several people have recently asked (either via the AIDSorigins site or via on-line message boards) for my opinions on the latest article about dating the beginning of the AIDS epidemic to Leopoldville/KInshasa in 1920.

The article is called "The early spread and epidemic ignition of HIV-1 in human populations", and though released earlier on-line, it was formally published in the October 5th, 2014 issue of Science; [2014; 346; 56-61]. Most of the article is consistent with the rest of the work by its authors: the mooted early history of HIV-1 is nothing more or less than computer-generated guesswork.

But the authors have had a major rethink about one of the previous problem areas in their work, and one crucial aspect of their analysis, though they do not advertise it, now aligns precisely with what I have been proposing for several years. In fact, it serves as another powerful confirmation of the OPV hypothesis. All this is explained in more detail in the notes below.

For many years I have been criticising Nature and Science for their biased mis-reporting and distortion of the Origins-of-AIDS debate.

Now a leading scientist - the latest winner of the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine, the US biologist Randy Schekman - has come out in public to criticise these journals for distorting the scientific process, and for representing a tyranny that needs to be broken.

Although versions of this multiple prize-winning film (which focuses on the OPV theory and the opposition it has encountered) have been available on and off on the Web for the last 10 years, the Canadian producers have made strenuous efforts to have any unofficial versions taken down. This would have been entirely reasonable had they made it easy to purchase the film documentary through other channels, but rather surprisingly they have not done so.